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"The streaming video company's recommendation algorithm can sometimes send you on an hours-long video binge so captivating that you never notice the time passing. But according to a study from software nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, trusting the algorithm means you're actually more likely to see videos featuring sexualized content and false claims than personalized interests."

"Twitter has proved a cherished forum for climate scientists to share research, as well as for activists seeking to rally action to halt oil pipelines or decry politicians' failure to cut pollution. But many are now fleeing Twitter due to a surge in climate misinformation, spam and even threats that have upended their relationship with the platform."

"The reasons for this "bot holiday", as Fisman calls it, are probably varied - but many of them point to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia's information war with western nations seems to be pivoting to new fronts, from vaccines to geopolitics."

"Facebook failed to label 80% of articles on its platform promoting a fast-spreading conspiracy theory that the US is funding the use of bioweapons in Ukraine, according to a study released Friday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH)."

"Sports Illustrated deleted web articles after a report claimed they were generated by artificial intelligence and published under fake author names. Tech publisher Futurism reported the issue after finding author headshots on an AI-generated image website. The Sports Illustrated Union said staff were "horrified" and demanded "basic journalistic standards". The publisher's owner disputed the report's accuracy, but it said it had launched an internal investigation. Arena Group, which owns the Sports Illustrated magazine and website, licensed the content from a third-party company, Advon Commerce, a company spokesperson said in a statement. Sports Illustrated has since removed the content after the allegations were raised, the statement added. Arena Group is now pursuing an internal investigation and has ended its partnership with Advon Commerce. "

"Russia propaganda group behind fake Kamala Harris hit-and-run story, says Microsoft Microsoft researchers found that the group created a video, paid an actor to appear as the alleged victim, and spread the claim through a fake website"

"Exposure to false and inflammatory content is remarkably low, with just 1% of Twitter users accounting for 80% of exposure to dubious websites during the 2016 U.S. election. This is heavily concentrated among a small fringe of users actively seeking it out. Examples: 6.3% of YouTube users were responsible for 79.8% of exposure to extremist channels from July to December 2020, 85% of vaccine-sceptical content was consumed by less than 1% of US citizens in the 2016-2019 period. Conventional wisdom blames platform algorithms for spreading misinformation. However, evidence suggests user preferences play an outsized role. For instance, a mere 0.04% of YouTube's algorithmic recommendations directed users to extremist content. It's tempting to draw a straight line between social media usage and societal ills. But studies rigorously designed to untangle cause and effect often come up short. "

"A core selling point of machine learning is discovery without understanding, which is why errors are particularly common in machine-learning-based science. Three years ago, we compiled evidence revealing that an error called leakage - the machine learning version of teaching to the test - was pervasive, affecting hundreds of papers from 17 disciplines. Since then, we have been trying to understand the problem better and devise solutions.  This post presents an update. In short, we think things will get worse before they get better, although there are glimmers of hope on the horizon."

"In a follow-up article published this week titled "No, a Remote Amazon Tribe Did Not Get Addicted to Porn," Nicas wrote that the aggregations of his article showed in part that the internet truly is a dark place, in part because of the way the story spread: "The Marubo people are not addicted to pornography. There was no hint of this in the forest, and there was no suggestion of it in The New York Times's article." In this article, Nicas blames the people who aggregated him for sensationalizing his article. That may be true, but Nicas's article is also sensationalist.  While the article does explore the history of Marubo people getting access to motor boats and radios and notes "(Some Marubo already had phones, often bought with government welfare checks, to take photographs and communicate when in a city)," it does not explain that many Marubo people have been using the internet for quite some time, and implies that the problems they are now grappling with are things that the Marubo people hadn't thought about before."

"Renée: What I find most alarming is that people have the ability to just create reality by making something trend, to reinforce over and over and over again these conspiracy theories. You do have this increasingly divergent set of realities where there's a deep conviction built up over many, many years of reinforcing the same tropes and stories. You can't just correct that with a fact check."

"Deepfakes were not the only manifestation of AI in the Indian elections. Long before the election began, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a tightly packed crowd celebrating links between the state of Tamil Nadu in the south of India and the city of Varanasi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Instructing his audience to put on earphones, Modi proudly announced the launch of his "new AI technology" as his Hindi speech was translated to Tamil in real time. In a country with 22 official languages and almost 780 unofficial recorded languages, the BJP adopted AI tools to make Modi's personality accessible to voters in regions where Hindi is not easily understood. Since 2022, Modi and his BJP have been using the AI-powered tool Bhashini, embedded in the NaMo mobile app, to translate Modi's speeches with voiceovers in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Odia, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi."

"Zuckerberg has said that the platform, which has more than 3 billion people worldwide logging on to its apps every day, will be adopting an Elon Musk-style community notes format for policing what is and isn't acceptable speech on its platforms. Starting in the US, the company will be dramatically shifting the Overton window towards whoever can shout the loudest. The Meta CEO all but admitted that the move was politically motivated. "It's time to get back to our roots around free expression," he said, confessing that "restrictions on topics like immigration and gender […] are out of touch with mainstream discourse". He admitted to past "censorship mistakes" - here, probably meaning the past four years of tamping down political speech while a Democratic president was in office - and said he would "work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more"."

"Put more simply? We're in the midst of a digital slopaggedon, with the felt everyday impacts ranging from mild irritants like graphs about "uncoked kermelss" to more serious information erosions - the replacing of images of famous artworks and historical events with AI-generated fakes, for example, or the flooding of social media with fake AI-generated imagery during environmental disasters."

"The announcement that Meta would be changing their approach to political content and discussions of gender is concerning, though it is unclear exactly what those changes are. Given that many product changes regarding those content areas were used in high-risk settings, a change intended to allay US free speech concerns could lead to violence incitement elsewhere. For example, per this post from Meta, reducing "content that has been shared by a chain of two or more people" was a content-neutral product change done to protect people in Ethiopia, where algorithms have been implicated in the spread of ethnic violence. A similar change - removing optimizations for reshared content - was discussed in this post concerning reductions in political content. Will those changes be undone? Globally? Such changes could also lead to increased amplification of attention getting discussions of gender. Per this report from Equimundo and Futures Without Violence, 40% of young men trust at least one "manosphere" influencer - who often exploit algorithmic incentives by posting increasingly extreme, attention-getting mixes of ideas about self-improvement, aggression, and traditional gender roles."

"What we know about reducing misinformation Where the evidence stands for six strategies used to reduce the spread and impact of misinformation, according to the Prosocial Design Network"

" More than half of top 100 mental health TikToks contain misinformation, study finds Guardian investigation reveals promotion of dubious advice, questionable supplements and quick-fix healing methods"